With six brand new short plays, three directors, and 11 actors, “Freedom Isn’t Finished”, presents a powerful start to Face Off Theatre Company’s 11th season in this stunning 90-minute theatre festival.
Kalamazoo has long cultivated, celebrated, and showcased new plays and the collaborative process of bringing them to life, and the Black Midwest Voices Project carries the torch of WMU’s New Play Project and Theatre Kalamazoo’s New Playfest.
Deliberately produced during Black History Month, part of what makes this performance so special is its organizing principle. They put the call out to Black Midwestern playwrights, asking the question “Is Freedom Finished?” And what came back, came to fruition, and will continue to evolve are the evocative works in this elegantly-produced staged reading series at The Carver Center Studio in Kalamazoo.
FOTC Artistic Director Marissa Harrington described the staged readings as “the blueprint before the building is complete”, a “living stage” in which actors perform with scripts in hand, and with lights, sound, props, and sets in the form of moveable pylons to create and shape spaces—wherein the audience is invited into the process, not just as observers, but as collaborators, who give feedback at the end of each show for the playwrights to shape future drafts.
It’s an intentional, co-created gift—artful, entertaining, provocative, and right on time.
The six short plays run the gamut from metaphorical, interpersonal scenes (Cut Short by Shantai Brown and Black, White, and Gray by Vickie G. Hampton) to time travel that elucidates hard-won voting rights not to be squandered (What Would Fannie Do? by Krystle Dellihue), to an historic reimagining of Hattie McDaniel’s night at The Oscars (Hattie by Krystle Dellihue), to the utterly poetic and lyrical (Different by Brooke Lindley), including an inspired, heart-wrenching Greek chorus of suicidal Black men (Sad and Low by Brandon Foxworth). Each director—Marissa Harrington, Xavier Bolden, and May Moe Tun—guides two of the short pieces with clarity of vision, focusing on specificity to drive home the larger ideals without ever becoming polemical.
The actors all give heartfelt performances, though there’s a range of abilities and skill. Juliene Winborne is especially commanding as Hattie McDaniel, Xavier Bolden is deeply affecting as generations of suffering embodied, Tim Baker is a powerful, gentle presence in each of his many roles, Kennedi Wheeler brings a naturalness and ease, and Khalid Canales-King offers both depth and light comedy.
From great conflict and suffering can come great art, and Face Off Theatre invites us into the creative process with terrific generosity and care. “Freedom Isn’t Finished” is a true labor of love, artfully asking critical questions through storytelling as an act of resistance that builds rather than divides community. This particular play festival effectively breaks down the imagined walls between art, artist, and audience so that we may, together, be more than the sum of our parts, deliberately changing the limitations of freedom as we witness and know it.
Freedom Isn't Finished
Face Off Theatre
Feb. 12-15
https://www.faceofftheatre.com/
